The Defense Department launched the Code.mil website on Tuesday, a new, streamlined portal for its similarly named Code.mil initiative, a collaborative approach to meeting the government’s open source policy.

The new website was designed to give a more straightforward user experience. The site features a suite of new tools, including checklists that links to offer guidance, and represents “an evolution of the Code.mil project,” according to Ari Chivukula, policy wrangler for the Defense Digital Service.

This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distributions sometime in the near future. Your "chief meteorologist" is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments below.

Technology is evolving faster than the speed of light. Well, not quite, but you get the picture. Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, OpenStack, progressive web apps – they are all set to make an impact this year. You might be accustomed to navigating your forex trading platform or building a website in WordPress, but how familiar are you with the following?

I have known Steven for more than a decade. Not only is he a top technology journalist and a consummate professional, he is a role model of mine.

Steven, well known by his initials SJVN, stands out -- not just because he's a good journalist. He stands out because he's a great explainer. When I want to understand a networking, operating systems, or Linux-related topic, I often turn to Steven or his articles.

Opto 22 announced its first Linux-based automation controller: a rugged “Groov EPIC” system that runs real-time Linux on a quad-core ARM SoC, and supports process and machine control, SCADA/RTU, and industrial IoT edge gateway applications.

Increasingly, industrial equipment manufacturers must not only compete on features, but also meet their clients’ need to attract the best developers. That often means shifting from proprietary RTOS or Windows based solutions to Linux. The latest to make the switch is Opto 22, whose announcement suggests the Groov EPIC controller represents a major new product direction compared to its previous Groov products.

A few months ago the new Video Game Console, Nintendo Switch, came onto the market. A console that revolutionized the gaming market thanks to its game modes… and its software. The Nintendo Console has been hacked and thanks to an exploit of the operating system, we can say that Nintendo Switch is capable of running Gnu/Linux.

Advantech is prepping a “SOM-5871” computer-on-module with an unannounced AMD V1000 Zen SoC, which appears to be AMD’s rumored, 14nm Ryzen Embedded V1000 “Great Horned Owl” successor to the R-Series. iBase also leaked info on a V1000 based Mini-ITX board and fanless PC.

The long-heralded open source AV1 codec is now set for development of commercial product, with the code complete and ready to be frozen over the next few weeks. This has been confirmed by contributors to the standard such as Austrian transcoding software developer Bitmovin, which hopes to be among the first to bring out a product. That will happen once members of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) that developed the codec sign off its performance.

Khronos' glTF transmission format for 3D scenes and models continues getting better. This 3D format has seen adoption by countless applications and engines and even usage within Microsoft products. Khronos' latest advancement to glTF 2.0 is a compression extension.

Now it's clear why Intel hasn't been working on the Beignet code-base in months as they have been quietly working on a new and better OpenCL stack and run-time! On open-source Intel OpenCL you can now have OpenCL 2.1 while OpenCL 2.2 support is on the way.

Intel by way of their Open-Source Technology Center quietly open-sourced a new compute runtime as well as an LLVM-based graphics compiler. Thanks to a sharp-eyed Phoronix reader for spotting and pointing out to us this new Intel OpenCL stack that hasn't really received any attention at all yet.

As a sign that DRI3 v1.1 is hopefully ready to go, Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne of Collabora on Friday sent out his latest set of patches adding modifiers and multi-plane support to the Direct Rendering Infrastructure.

DRI3 v1.1 has been a long, ongoing project for this first major addition to the DRI3 infrastructure. Namely there is support for explicit format modifiers and pixmaps backed by multi-planar buffers. Collabora has also already been working on some experimental DRI3 v1.2 patches for DMA fences, which originally was part of the v1.1 patches, but then pushed back to their own series.

While Amarok was once KDE's dominant music player, it hasn't seen a new release now in about five years and has yet to see a release based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. But there's hope that might still happen.

In the absence of a modern Amarok release there have been plenty of other KDE media players coming about like Elisa and Babe, but coming out today is an updated patch for bringing Amarok to a Qt5/KF5 world.

In essence, when a software developer contributes code to a project (i.e., the Work under the license), he or she becomes a Contributor. Under the above term, Contributors are granting permission to use any of their patents that may read on their contribution. This provides peace of mind to users since the Contributor would likely be prevented from pursuing patent royalties from any users of the software covering that contribution to the project.

Complexities arise when the software developer contributes code that is not claimed by any of the Contributor's patents by itself, but only when combined with the Apache 2.0 licensed open source program to which the contribution was made (i.e., the Work under the license). Thus, the Contributor owning such a patent could pursue patent royalties against a user of that revised Work. The authors of the Apache 2.0 license were forward thinking and account for this scenario. Section 3 states that the license applies to "patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed... by a combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contributions was submitted."

The development of the next Ubuntu LTS release, i.e., Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver, is going on in full swing. The desktop development team has decided to add a new option in the installation process that allows you to perform a lean installation of Ubuntu.

If you’ve spent any time in the Snapcraft forum, it’s quite likely you’ve come across Dan Llewellyn – a keen community advocate or self-proclaimed Snapcrafter. Dan has always had a passion for computing and is completely self-taught. Outside of the community, Dan is a freelance WordPress developer. After getting into the open source world around 1998, he has switched between various Linux distros including Suse, RedHat, Gentoo before settling on Ubuntu from the 5.04 release onwards. A longtime participant in the UK Ubuntu chatroom – where he met Canonical’s Alan Pope – Dan admits he was never that active before Snapcraft came along.

It was spending time in the UK chatroom around 2016 that he discovered snaps which piqued his interest. “I saw the movement of changing Clicks to snaps and thought it was an interesting idea. It’s more widely focused than a mobile app delivery system and I’ve always liked things that also worked on the server, IoT and elsewhere” Dan comments. With a previous desire to get into mobile app development and seeing the move away from Ubuntu Touch, Dan was eager to see Snapcraft succeed and felt like it was something he could contribute to.

If you like a challenge and love your platformers, you might want to take a look at Switch - Or Die Trying [Steam] which recently added Linux support.

This is the first PC game from Threye Interactive, which added Linux support a few days ago on February 12th. Along with the Linux release, they also permanently reduced the price of the game to £5.19/$6.99. It's currently on sale with 33% off, so you can save a bit on it during the current Steam sales.

Boo! Greedy Kid [Steam] is a game about a boy with an unhealthy soda addiction that's wreaking havoc in order to obtain more of the good stuff. You can also use your own voice in the game to scare people.

Once Upon A Coma, a new story-driven adventure game from the creator of the rather good Pinstripe is currently on Kickstarter and it looks brilliant. It's already about to hit the funding goal of $28,000 with 29 days left still to go, so it looks like it will easily happen.

This week we have delivered the first Linux benchmarks of the OpenGL/Vulkan graphics capabilities of AMD's new Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Vega 8 on the Ryzen 3 2200G an the Vega 11 on Ryzen 5 2400G. Those tests have included comparisons to the integrated graphics capabilities of Intel processors as well as older AMD Kaveri APUs. For those interested in seeing how the Raven Ridge Vega graphics compare to lower-end Radeon and GeForce discrete graphics cards, here are those first Linux benchmarks.

Modern Linux distributions tend to target a variety of users. Some claim to offer a flavor of the open source platform that anyone can use. And, I’ve seen some such claims succeed with aplomb, while others fall flat. Q4OS is one of those odd distributions that doesn’t bother to make such a claim but pulls off the feat anyway.

So, who is the primary market for Q4OS? According to its website, the distribution is a:

“fast and powerful operating system based on the latest technologies while offering highly productive desktop environment. We focus on security, reliability, long-term stability and conservative integration of verified new features. System is distinguished by speed and very low hardware requirements, runs great on brand new machines as well as legacy computers. It is also very applicable for virtualization and cloud computing.”

So if you haven't noticed, the entire cryptocurrency mining thing has become a bit of an absurd stage play over the last few months. From gamers being unable to buy graphics cards thanks to miners hoping to cash in on soaring valuations, to hackers using malware to covertly infect websites with cryptocurrency miners that use visitors' CPU cycles without their knowledge or consent. As an additional layer of intrigue, some websites have also begun using such miners as an alternative to traditional advertising, though several have already done so without apparently deeming it necessary to inform visitors.

At the heart of a lot of this drama is crypotcurreny mining software company Coinhive, whose software is popping up in both malware-based and above board efforts to cash in on the cryptocurrency mining craze. Coinhive specifically focuses on using site visitor CPU cycles to help mine Monero. The company's website insists that their product can help websites craft "an ad-free experience, in-game currency or whatever incentives you can come up with." The company says its project has already resulted in the mining of several million dollars worth of Monero (depending on what Monero's worth any given day).

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are proving difficult to fix, and initial experiments suggest security patches will cause significant performance penalties to HPC applications. Even as these patches are rolled out to current HPC platforms, it might be helpful to explore how future HPC systems could be better insulated from CPU or operating system security flaws that could cause massive disruptions. Surprisingly, most of the core concepts to build supercomputers that are resistant to a wide range of threats have already been invented and deployed in HPC systems over the past 20 years. Combining these technologies, concepts, and approaches not only would improve cybersecurity but also would have broader benefits for improving HPC performance, developing scientific software, adopting advanced hardware such as neuromorphic chips, and building easy-to-deploy data and analysis services. This new form of “Fluid HPC” would do more than solve current vulnerabilities. As an enabling technology, Fluid HPC would be transformative, dramatically improving extreme-scale code development in the same way that virtual machine and container technologies made cloud computing possible and built a new industry.

For the last three years or so, Red Hat has been on a collision course with CoreOS, with both firms aiming to grow their respective Kubernetes platform. On Jan. 30, the competition between the two firms ended, with CoreOS agreeing to be acquired by Red Hat in a $250 million deal.

Canonical's Mir team has released Mir v0.30 as the latest version of this display server that for the past year has been retooling itself with Wayland protocol support.

With today's Mir 0.30 release, they have continued on their Wayland conquest and are offering better support for Wayland protocols. Some of the Wayland changes in Mir 0.30 include a client connection change to allow Wayland clients to work on Unity 8, a keyboard state change to fix switching between clients, multiple crash fixes, and experimental support for the XDG-Shell v6 protocol.

NVIDIA has begun work on sending out patches for upstreaming Tegra194 "Xavier" SoC support within the Linux kernel.

Xavier is NVIDIA's successor to the Tegra P1 and will begin sampling this quarter. Xavier makes use of a custom ARMv8 eight-core CPU, Volta-based graphics with 512 CUDA cores, integration of the DLA tensor processing unit, and is manufactured on a 12nm FinFET process. Xavier should be a mighty powerful SoC for their self-driving car systems and other "edge computing" use-cases.

While Mesa 18.0 should be released in the days ahead as the latest feature release to Mesa 3D, backporting of fixes/improvements to Mesa 17.3 isn't letting up. For those using this stable series from last quarter, Mesa 17.3.4 is out today with nearly 100 changes.

More in Tux Machines

Why open source could be IBM's key to future success in the cloud

Do those same developers need IBM? Developers certainly benefit from IBM's investments in open source, but it's not as clear that those same developers have much to gain from IBM's cloud. Google, for example, has done a stellar job open sourcing code like TensorFlow and Kubernetes that feeds naturally into running related workloads on Google Cloud Platform. Aside from touting its Java bonafides, however, IBM has yet to demonstrate that developers get significant benefits for modern workloads on its cloud.
That's IBM's big challenge: Translating its open source expertise into real, differentiated value for developers on its cloud.

Top 8 Debian-Based Distros

Most people tend to forget that despite Ubuntu's success over the years, it's still just a distro based on another distro - Debian. Debian on its own, however, isn't really well suited for newer users...hence the explosion of distros based on Debian over the recent years. There are lot of great choices for Linux users. Which one is best for you?

Compact, rugged IoT gateway offers dual GbE with PoE

Inforce has launched a $250 “Inforce 6320” IoT gateway that runs Linux on a quad -A53 Snapdragon 410, and offers WiFi, BT, GPS, HDMI, USB, -30 to 85°C support, and dual GbE ports with PoE.
Inforce Computing’s $250 Inforce 6320 is a compact (170 x 95 x 42mm) IoT gateway that runs Ubuntu Core (Snappy) and Debian on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410E. Inforce promises “periodic upstream kernel based BSP releases [that] include in-depth documentation along with a host of royalty-free software.” The Debian BSP includes LXDE, drivers for all available interfaces, as and access to the Inforce TechWeb tech support services.